The art of misdirection -- it's the foundational technique for any deception or sleight of hand. Capture the attention of your audience with a distraction and you can get away with playing any number of tricks.

Misdirection is also a classic campaign tactic. When you know you don't have logic or public opinion on your side, you try to divert the audience's attention. As the 2016 legislative session quickly approaches, this is exactly the tactic that opponents of raising the minimum wage are relying on. Instead of making an honest defense why it's OK for full-time workers to live in poverty, they're attempting to change the subject by conjuring confusing claims about inflation and poverty reduction.

The stakes are simply too high to spend time misdirecting the facts. The reality is simple: Right now, an Oregonian working full time for $9.25 an hour earns less than $20,000 a year. No matter how you slice it, that's just not enough to afford the basics like housing, food and trips to the doctor. More than half a million Oregonians will benefit if the statewide wage floor is increased to a level necessary to provide a basic standard of living in even Oregon's most rural counties. The average minimum wage worker is a 35-year-old woman, many of whom are the primary or co-breadwinner for their families. These are folks struggling to support themselves and their families with their hard work.

One of the arguments often heard from opponents is that raising wages is not an effective way to reduce poverty because some of the money gained in a raise will be lost to taxes or lost benefits. It's ironic to hear groups who traditionally push for self-sufficiency advocating to keep working people on public assistance, and it's fundamentally disrespectful to say that the benefits of a raise would be negligible. Ask any one of the half-a-million low-wage workers in Oregon if they think a raise would make their financial challenges worse, and opponents' arguments start to sound even more tone-deaf.

Raising the minimum wage would mean thousands of dollars more a year in take-home pay for people who are struggling to get by. It's disingenuous to say that wouldn't make a difference. That money is a car payment paid on time every month, a visit to the doctor for a sick child or a trip to the grocery store that doesn't have to be put on a credit card or on an electronic benefit transfer (EBT) card.

As Gladys, a low-wage worker at the Portland airport recently said, "When you don't have a penny, a dollar is a lot."

Higher wages will enable hardworking people to transition from safety net programs to self-sufficiency. The argument that raising the wage will hurt workers just doesn't make sense, because what really hurts our communities is when families are struggling to survive while corporations like Walmart are paying their workers poverty wages for the sake of profits.

More than 200,000 Oregonians in low-wage jobs do not receive any public benefits at all and would directly benefit from an increase in wages. More than that, though, is the fact that people want to be self-sufficient. Oregonians want to get an honest day's pay for an honest day's work and be able to come home and take care of their families. People don't want to have to rely on public assistance like food stamps just to survive. When low-wage workers have to depend on public assistance to get by and taxpayer dollars are subsidizing the profits of Oregon corporations that pay their workers those low wages, things need to change.

In the coming months, we're going to see plenty of misdirection by corporate interests and others who oppose raising the wage. But throughout this debate, it's important that we focus on a simple question: Will we take action to make Oregon's working families self-sufficient, or will we maintain a pernicious status quo? The answer requires no sleight of hand. People across the state know that workers and their families need a raise -- and they need it now.

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Tom Chamberlain is president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, a federation of trade unions representing over 300,000 workers across Oregon.